Meta

Get Ready for Something New

Over the past week the garden professors have been playing with something new, and we think it’s time to try it live with all of you.

Hopefully some of you are aware of Google and Google +. On Google + there is a feature called “Hangouts” which lets you interact directly with up to ten people at once using camera and microphone. More than that can participate by watching the discussion (though I’m still working that out on my computer — it should be ready by the time we go live.)

Next Thursday August 30 at 11:20 Eastern, 10:20 Central, 9:20 Mountain, and 8:20 Pacific time we’re going to start a hangout on Google + and invite all of you to join. Then we’re going to start a live discussion.

The topic of the discussion is related to, but not exactly the same as, Bert’s somewhat controversial post from last week — “Should the government be able to require you to plant natives on your own land.”

As a side note, if you want to read how the Florida Native Plant Society responded to that post please read this. Wow! Even though the topic we’ll be discussing doesn’t deal with Bert’s post directly, hopefully someone (or a few people) from the FNPS will join us. I’ll drop a comment onto their blog to make sure they at least know about the opportunity.

We are open to tangents in the discussion. We want this to be open ended, fun, and informative.

So what do you need to do if you want to participate? For right now the thing to do would be to get a google + account. Just go here. Also, if you don’t have a camera or microphone hooked up to your computer — now would be a good time to do that. We’d also appreciate it if you’d comment on this post to let us know that you are planning on participating (or want to participate but can’t make it). Please keep in mind that if we don’t have much participation we probably won’t try this again — at least not for awhile.

We’ll provide more instructions and information on the blog as we get closer to next Thursday. We’re looking forward to this and hope that many of you can join us.